The world of gulf migrants revolve around visas, medical tests, salaries, remittances, rents, salary cuts and delays, termites on the bed and calls back home. Life is lived between flights or plans of flights back home. Generations have worked in this region from South Asia and the story continues. This is particularly true of tier B or C city residents who seek a better life, when when top tier school grads are struggling to find jobs back home.

Sometimes we let others fulfil our dreams

Only to forget ours

To consume the present well

We live the image of the imaginations

Only to wonder the pale shadow of doubt

Was the dream

An inheritance or a path to moksha?

Couple of cool cab conversations today, with an Ethiopian who speaks Hindi fluently, from the border of Somalia who is here for two decades, recommended Al Habshi restaurants for traditional Ethiopian fare. We spoke about the new president whom he clearly likes. He is clearly at ease in the multicultural milieu that he is in.

Another ride got me going speaking with a cabbie from Chittagong, who will be soon starting his own cleaning business with a partner here in Dubai after 15 years of working as a transporter. He was encouraging entrepreneurship as he was speaking in Bangla that, Dubai is a vibrant city with those with energy and ideas.

The Ethiopian certainly spoke better Hindi than the Bangladeshi. Globalisation is fluid and surprises oneself everyday.

#migrantscholars

Attended an impromptu Book Launch at Kinokuniya, Dubai Mall of an Egyptian American Civil Engineer turned Cook Book Author Hanan Sayed, where a bunch of well heeled cool book enthusiasts were present including other restaurant owners (The Bearded Bakers from Sydney were a hawt favourite of the fashionable crowd). There was a MBC crew as well.

The author read out her introduction which is on the nomadic global cuisine of Abu Dhabi as her family has lived here for 25 years. It sounded like an essay on the social anthropology of food in Abu Dhabi.

#Dubai @ Kinokuniya BookStore Dubai Mall

More than big data, there is an acute need of proper primary data where it is not available on public databases and proxy indicator driven data is incomplete at best.

Rather than depicting the right baseline, we are often more concerned with the analysis. We need start ups who would collect basic data first and then think about visualisation, and predictive analytics.

Any app yet to replace the field anthropologist to collect cold objective data from respondents for policy makers? Ofcourse remote sensing and GIS spatial analytics help a great deal.

A long walk along the Bur Dubai Creek from the new Al Seef Waterfront, glitzy like Al Mouj in Muscat to the old part of the creek, via the Al Seef Heritage Village which is a very family friendly place with a whole host of restaurants and shopping options including a Singaporean restaurant called Kim’s. The space reminded me of Makansutra in Singapore with its emphasis on heritage within the global marketplace. The cultural element was quite a highlight with the kahwa and the dates.

The other end of the creek was the historic Bur Dubai Spice Market, and the Creek Abra, or Water Taxi Station with the bustle of Meena Bazaar. The Bank of Baroda Building really stood out. I remembered Rahul Dravid being the brand ambassador of the bank once upon a time with the tagline- India’s International Bank. With the Chanda Kochchar Scandal, those were innocent times.

The constant hustling of the sales folk, were a reminder of fashion street, Bandra in Bombay. The place also was reminiscent of Mutrah Souk in Muscat. Places converge in the consciousness as idioms overlap, reminding us of our need for a shared future.

The traditional focus point of Commerce, the creek is a sliding scale from traditional Modernity to Global Modernity in a span of 6 kilometres return. The hustle at one end to the calm realm at the newly done waterfront is a unique spatiotemporal compression, where the global now meets the global past.

#migrantscholars

@ Al Seef Dubai

Life is a concert of contradictions

And

A Symphony of Strategies

Mostly unknown

Encountered at each bend

And my heart is a repository of diminished dreams,

but new ones flower,

new hope arises,

only to be flattened at the next bend

Meena Bazar, Bur Dubai. The only Hindu Temple in the UAE too adjacent to a Masjid. Dubai exemplifies tolerance. @ Dubai Museum